This is the start of the promised return of Huliganov, with the alphabet already covered in the previous series of ten lessons we launch into the basics of the grammar of the Russian language.

I have had to divide this into two parts to get past the bit restriction. Part two is still being processed, and will be ready tomorrow.

The second part of the earlier lesson, rounded of with an illustrated joke and an 'a capello' rendition of one of Pushkin's famous poems.

Here we take a side step for one lesson and deal with the issue of Russian given names, featuring the full form and diminutive of the main names and a breakdown as to origin. It rounds off with the usual joke and song, this time a version of My Way with lyrics written by the Russian comedian Evgenii Petrosyan

I answer a request from one of my viewers about the words for friend in Russian, and an analysis of what friendship is all about. What insights do Russian and other languages give us? This contains both a philological and a philosophical look at the question of what a friend is.

We increase the number of 1a conjugation verbs and simple adverbs, enabling a larger number of simple sentences without direct objects (coming soon) to be made. There is an exercise here which should be done as well as you can and the answers are in the second part of the lesson, which is in a separate video which I will be posting in a few days after I have finished the subtitling, which is actually fairly time-consuming. In addition you should try to use the new vocabulary, in conjunction with the vocabulary from earlier lessons, to make as many sentences as possible - even if sentences made just for grammar practice can be a bit silly at times!

The link to the new discussion group announced in the video is

http://groups.google.com/group/huliganov

Here are the answers to the earlier first half of the lesson, rounded off as ever with a joke and a song.

We continue with 1a verbs and look at the structure of the patronymic in Russian. This again is the first half of a lesson as I cannot compress them without distorting the subtitles.

The second part of lesson 5 of RL 102 course.

I was asked for help with rolling the "r"s. I give what help I can, and go into a detailed linguistic panorama of this liquid consonant.

In the first part of this lesson, we look at the future imperfective, and have a first glimpse of aspects of the verb, as well as looking at 1a verbs with roots in Y and E.

It will probably take me a good week or so to code and submit the second half of this, but you have this much, which is 17 minutes or so, to be getting on with! I am afraid I am very busy right now, I wish I could tell you what with, but it is client confidential.

This is the first of the revised idea of these lessons - rather shorter (and hopefully therefore more frequent) and either a joke or a song - this time we look at the national anthem and its recent history.

The grammar covered is the direct object personal pronouns (which are both the genitive and the accusative forms in one, since the personal pronouns are implicitly animate).

The next lesson in the series. Introd-U-cing Russian's non-verbal way of having or possessing something.

This is the ninth lesson of the basic grammar course, which follows on from the ten lesson alphabet course called RL 101.

This lesson is about different ways of saying you can do something - both knowing how to do it, and being physically able to do it.

The course continues with the dative case of pronouns.

We're building on the dative case pronouns learned last time by using them in phrases. By mixing around the pronouns, you'll be able to make hundreds of original sentences which will serve in many situations.

Here we have a follow-up on the dative constructions lesson last time, looking more closely at the structure of the two reflexive verbs taking the dative that we had last time, for liking and feeling like...

This time we look at the highly irregular conjugation of "khotet'", to want, and introduce the instrumental case of personal pronouns.

This time we are looking at how to call and be called, and this brings us nicely into 1b verbs. For the accompaniment to the ending song I am indebted to Krzysztof Piotrowicz of Perth.